Inside the van, Leila’s gloved hands carefully placed the dish into the microscope’s sample chamber. She evacuated the chamber and commanded the computer to lower the microscope’s needle to the surface of the sample.
An atomic force microscope creates an image by tracking the point of an infinitesimally thin diamond needle—in this case, just ten atoms wide at the tip—across the sample, letting it rise and fall as it is repelled by the charge of the electrons on the minute features it encounters. A clutch of lasers detects the position of the needle and relays the information to the computer, which generates an image. Leila watched the picture appear line by line while Rock helped the captain out of the fire suit.
“How’s it coming?” Cap asked over the comm.
“I think you’ll be interested in this,” she said.
He climbed inside the van, followed by Rock and Dr. Bhotamo.
“That’s no chemical compound or virus.” She reached over to adjust the monitor. The four gazed at a false-color computer-enhanced image as it focused into a jumble of identical shapes frozen in a sea of elemental atoms.
The shapes—oblong and identical—looked U-shaped, like a length of channel iron. The outer surface bristled with armatures that—if they had been on a bacterium the same size—could have been the hairlike cilia used for locomotion. Those, however, would have been curved. The cilia one these objects consisted of straight sections connected at ball-and-socket joints. More arms clustered inside the lengthwise U-channel. These looked even more complex, some of them ending in tips of various incomprehensible shapes, some in what looked for all the world like miniature scalpels, and still others that mimicked construction tools.
What appeared to be cogwheels or gears a few ten-thousandths of an inch wide connected each to the main body.
Cap turned his attention to Dr. Bhotamo. “Are these yours?” he asked with simple directness.
Bhotamo shook his head, his deep brown eyes gazing intently at the screen. “We make weapons, but we don’t make them this small. One division has been working on microbotics for several years, but all they have so far are some gears and tongs ten times larger than this. And a DC motor, none of which they’d originated. I know of only one researcher who could possibly have gotten this far.”
“Dr. Madsen,” Cap said.
Dr. Bhotamo nodded. “Yes. But how could he have acquired the funding for this after his expulsion from Stanford?”
Cap stared at the screen, shifting the field of view around with a trackball control. “He could have built the prototype in a microfactory the size of a thimble attached to a home computer. All he needed was the conceptual breakthrough this design reveals. Just look at the way those carbon rods attach to the silicon shafts. And that electrostatic motor there—it’s genius in action. He’s got shapes there that no one could get using mask fabrication techni—”
“Cap,” Leila said, “temperature’s rising in the chamber. Should I add more helium?”
Rock perked up. “Da, chyort vosmi! I don’t want to see those things come alive again!”
Cap shook his head. “The freeze inactivated them. Look at those cracks along the central channel. I’ll wager they can’t stand up to temperature extremes. Heat or cold. We’ve got a weapon against that lake of them out there, but we need something that will stop them wherever they may appear, including on or inside living tissue.”
“If they’re man-made,” Rock said, “what in hell are they doing melting everything they touch?”
“Simple,” Cap said, saving the microscope scan to the memory of the powerful computer and switching off the screen. “They’re tearing matter apart for raw materials. These things are the ultimate recyclers.”
“But what are they using the matter for?” Leila asked.
Cap stood and stretched, bending to do so in the cramped van. “To build copies of themselves. More scavengers.”
A worried look passed across Dr. Bhotamo’s face. “Something must be wrong with whatever passes for their programming— nothing is telling them to stop making copies. Mechanical cancer.”
Rock ground his teeth together for a moment, then rumbled out, “You mean these things could just keep replicating until they’ve dismantled entire planet?”
Cap nodded grimly. “Left on their own, they’d probably just cover one continent—there’s not much in seawater they could use and the salt would probably corrode them. But people and animals can carry them. Aircraft and automobiles. Ships.” He turned toward his assistants.
“Leila—set up the magnetic trap. I want to isolate an active sample. Rock—coordinate with Dr. Bhotamo on freezing that pool with liquid helium—”
“I don’t think we have enough for that,” Bhotamo said.
“How about nitrogen?”
“Yes, plenty on hand.”
“All right. Nitrogen ought to be cold enough. Have someone bring a truckload. Flash?”
“Here, skipper.”
“Locate Dr. Julius Madsen, Ph.D.s in molecular chemistry and electronics. Start with the Bay Area. I suspect we’ll find him somewhere near this mess. And contact the others. Tell them we’ve got a hot one.”
“Roger—over and out.” With that, Flash signed off.
Leila stood in the door of the van, gazing outward at the eerie mirror surface of the pool of busy microbots. Overhead, police and TV news helicopters thwupped around in circles, vying for prime viewing position.
“Cap.” Her voice held an edge of apprehension. “Take a look at this.”
“What?” he said, stepping over behind her.
“The pool—it’s moving! ”
Chapter Six Flash Reports
Phil “The Flash” Hoile—Philip James Hoile, more formally— turned his attention away from the TV monitors to concentrate on the computer screen above him. In the cool, low light of the spacious room, he reclined on a chair that conformed to his body, pulled the large keyboard into position, and lay back to search for Dr. Madsen.
The computer room served as the nerve center of Richard Anger’s non-Institute operations. Inaccessible to faculty or researchers, it was the nexus of activity for Captain Anger and his six gifted partners.
And in it, Flash reigned as undisputed master.
Even though Captain Anger probably knew as much or more about computers and electronics, his knowledge of economics and human organization was even deeper; knowing the value of division of labor allowed Captain Anger the luxury of assigning tasks to others without worry or the constant need to micro-manage. Flash had never met a more trusting, confident man than Richard Anger III.
Hoile’s long, slender fingers raced over the keyboard. His first electronic destination was the inner depths of Cyclops, the Universal Encyclopedia. The brainchild—literally—of Flash, Cap, and the Anger Institute, the ultra-fast computer Cyclops comprised over 1,000,000 parallel processors, each of which could tear apart a problem and work on a part of its solution. Cyclops held within its silicon innards nearly one quadrillion pieces of knowledge. It was more than a huge catalogue, though. Cyclops held its information relationally; that is, every bit of information related to other bits. Its neural nets stored information the way a human brain would—holographically: here and there, all over the net, designed with numerical, probabilistic connections that allowed Cyclops not only to store and retrieve information, but to interpret it and acquire more.
It was, at this point in its artificial life, self-learning. Using optical scanners and text-recognition programs, Cyclops could “read” four different human languages (English, German, Japanese, and Russian).